The Ottoman World-City

In 1966 the historian Arnold Toynbee published an essay on “Man and His Settlements” in the journal Ekistics. In it Toynbee argued that the future world city (or ecumenopolis) would be on modelled on medieval Ottoman precedents, rather than the ancient Greek city-state. Although citizens would be members of a neighbourhood community, their main allegiance would be to affinity groups that were dispersed, rather than sharing the same physical space. These “diasporas” would be the equivalents of the millets of the old Ottoman Empire.

Ecumenopolis is going to organize itself, into a combine of diasporas. In Ecumenopolis the diasporas will, of course, be far more numerous and more various, and each of them will be world-wide; but, on this global scale, it will be Ottoman, not Western, in its community structure.[1]

In his massive A Study of History Toynbee had shown no interest in cities. Now, in his seventies, Toynbee threw himself into urban history and planning, editing the volume Cities of Destiny (1967) and producing a collection of essays entitled Cities on the Move (1970). Toynbee’s inspiration was the Greek architect and inventor of ekistics, a new “science of human settlements”, Constantinos Doxiadis (1913-1975). Ekistics was Doxiadis’ house journal. Was this a case of an elderly Toynbee jumping a bandwagon? Alongside Doxiadis, Jean Gottmann and Charles Abrams had also published hefty, widely-reviewed volumes addressing an inner-city malaise evident in, to pick but one example, the 1967 Newark riots.[2]  Was Doxiadis exploiting Toynbee’s fame to bring added lustre to the ekistic project? And what did the Ottoman millet system have to teach anyone about a future World City?

Three Greek Educations

DOXIADIS IN PAKISTAN

Toynbee’s epiphany had taken place in 1960. In Karachi. On a visit three years before Toynbee had encountered “human flotsam and jetsam”, refugees displaced from India by Partition, inhabiting “shanty-towns” situated “between mangrove-swamp and gravel desert.” Now he found those same refugees “striking root again”, in “a string of simply but decently built and skilfully designed new settlements” that had been “kept within human dimensions.”[3] These settlements were just one example of the work of Doxiadis’ firm, Doxiadis Associates, that specialized in large-scale housing, regional-planning, and development projects in countries undergoing decolonization, rapid population growth, and economic transformation.

Toynbee met Doxiadis in Athens two years later. The pair struck up a friendship that lasted until their deaths, built on a shared sense that humanity lacked the tools necessary to respond to one of the greatest challenges “rushing towards it”: the future “ecumenopolis”, the universal or world city. Thanks to explosive population growth, the relationship between city and nature had been reversed. Where once cities had been scattered dots on the landscape, separated from surrounding nature by walls, those cities were now agglomerating into a single, globe-straddling settlement. Now it was the isolated pockets of nature that were walled round, to protect them from man. As both a descriptive and prescriptive science, ekistics offered therapies to “man”, who was rapidly “becoming a displaced person within his own settlement.”[4]

In his autobiographical collection Experiences (1969) Toynbee referred to his encounter with Doxiadis as the third of “Three Greek Educations” he had received across his life, the other two being his study of classics at Winchester College in the early 1900s and his tramp around Greece in 1911/12. On a personal level, the new science of ekistics brought Toynbee full circle: the outlines of ancient Greek cities he had tramped over in his Wanderjahr (1911-12) were now being analyzed by Doxiadis’ Ancient Cities Project, that aimed to produce an “archive” that could be used to distil the rules that supposedly governed ancient Greek town planning.

The Lausanne Connection

The Greco-Turkish War and the Lausanne population exchange could be added as a fourth “Greek education”, one that Toynbee and Doxiadis had in common. Toynbee witnessed the genocidal violence unleashed by the Greek army at Yalova in May 1921. A Western construct of “nationality” led “mutually indispensable neighbours” that had cohabited under the Ottoman millet system to kill each other in pursuit of a nation-state to call their very own.[5] The Doxiadis family belonged to the broader movement of ethnic Greek refugees who arrived in Greece before and during the First World War as the Ottoman Empire fragmented. Doxiadis’s father, Apostolos Doxiadis (1873-1942), a pediatrician, was forced to flee with his wife and young children to Athens amid the violence and territorial upheavals of the Balkan Wars.

Displacement, insecurity, and the loss of home were not abstract geopolitical conditions for the Doxiadis family, but part of its own recent history.

Displacement, insecurity, and the loss of home were not abstract geopolitical conditions for the family, but part of its own recent history. Apostolos Doxiadis (Constantinos’ father) was put in charge of assisting those forcibly displaced by Lausanne. As a physician and public figure, he understood his responsibility towards refugees not simply as the provision of shelter, but as a question of human welfare, health, dignity, and social organization. Growing up within this familial and political world, for Constantinos Doxiadis the relationship between expertise and human distress would have been difficult to separate. The parallel with his father is suggestive: Apostolos sought international assistance for populations displaced by war; Constantinos would later seek Allied and international support for the reconstruction of Greece after the Second World War.

Who will compose the sambas?

This anecdote exposes an important limit within the Ekistics project, and a difference between Doxiadis and Toynbee. Doxiadis’s response to complexity was to enlarge the field of knowledge. If planning failed to account for cultural expression, psychology, social relations or other dimensions of human experience, then the science of settlements had to become more comprehensive. Toynbee confronted limits by turning toward history and moral transformation. Their positions overlap, but they do not coincide.

By the time he encountered Toynbee Doxiadis’ attention was turning to the ecological and social costs of accelerating urbanization. He and Toynbee reflected on inherited habits versus unprecedented change, specialization, communication overload, technological scale, and loss of democratic agency. Doxiadis kept discovering things his system could not adequately contain. After proposing to eliminate favelas, he was asked who will compose the sambas if the favelados disappear. He admitted that ekistics did not yet understand the problem: “we are only beginning our study of the science of human settlements.”[6]

Toynbee’s historical and increasingly spiritual understanding of civilizations made him doubtful that expertise could ultimately solve the deepest forms of civilizational crisis. Political institutions and technologies might stabilize conditions without necessarily producing creative or moral renewal, something Toynbee (a Victorian after all) understood as the product of salutary suffering, and perhaps too by isolated communities of “primitives” and creatives he proposed to protect within distinct enclaves.[7] Toynbee suggests that some dimensions of human existence may ultimately exceed planning. Doxiadis repeatedly responds that planning does not yet know enough.

Diasporas

Toynbee imagines ecumenopolis as simultaneously cellular and what he called “diasporic”: cellular in the organization of everyday material life, but diasporic in the formation of cultural, religious, professional, and intellectual communities. People live locally but belong socially and intellectually to networks that may be geographically dispersed. His examples range from faith communities (analogues to the Ottoman millets) to bird-watchers, dog-breeders, and rose-growers.[8] The point is not simply that modern communication creates a wholly new social condition. Toynbee’s deeper argument is historical: technology intensifies a much older human capacity to maintain community across territorial separation.

The concept of diaspora, however, introduces a problem. A worldwide community of rose-growers is not equivalent to a population dispersed through expulsion, persecution, or compulsory migration.

The concept of diaspora, however, introduces a problem. A worldwide community of rose-growers is not equivalent to a population dispersed through expulsion, persecution, or compulsory migration. Diaspora is not simply a network; it can also be the memory of a violently lost settlement. As Doxiadis noted, technologies of communication that allowed such diasporas to thrive posed other challenges: it was becoming harder to distinguish “fact” from “guess”, to know “when to lift the receiver, and when not to.”[9]

A Productive Tension

Toynbee and Doxiadis drew different lessons from displacement. Toynbee’s experience of the destruction produced by territorial nationalism encouraged him to imagine forms of community that could survive without exclusive territorial possession. Doxiadis’s family history exposed the other side of dispersal: homelessness, dependence on relief, loss of livelihood, illness, overcrowding, and prolonged instability. Toynbee extracted from displacement an ideal of translocal community; Doxiadis inherited from it an ethic and apparatus of rehabilitation. The productive tension is that each perceived something the other risked neglecting. Territorial settlement can become exclusionary and violent, but celebrating dispersion can obscure the need for a meaningful place in which everyday life can be reconstructed.

Read together, Toynbee’s and Doxiadis’s work therefore leaves us not with a completed science of the world city but with an unresolved question. How can knowledge operate across planetary scales without losing sight of the situated, embodied forms of life from which settlements are made? The question links displacement to adaptation, the local survey to Ecumenopolis, and the human-scale neighborhood to the increasingly complex technological networks surrounding it. It also explains why the encounter between Toynbee and Doxiadis remains more interesting than a simple confrontation between humanism and technocracy: both understood that the central problem of the emerging world city was not scale alone, but whether human beings and their institutions could adapt to the systems they were themselves bringing into being.

Notes

[1] Toynbee, “Man and His Settlements: an historical approach”, Ekistics 21.123 (1966): 80.

[2] Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (Boston: MIT Press, 1961); Charles Abrams, The City is the Frontier (New York: Harper & Row,1965).

[3] A. J. Toynbee, Experiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 41.

[4] C. Doxiadis, Ekistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 5.

[5] Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: a study in the contact of civilisations (London: Constable, 1922), p. 18.

[6] Doxiadis, Ekistics, p. 3.

[7] Diana Rowntree, “The Science of the City”, Ekistics, 22.131 (1966), 243.

[8] Toynbee, “Settlements: an historical approach”, Ekistics 21.123 (1966): 77.

[9] Doxiadis cited in “Delos IV”, Ekistics 22.131 (1966), 236 and 243.

Blogposts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.